The Jordan River

            Rivers make great barriers. Rivers are dangerous and unpredictable, deep here and shallow there, calm on the surface but swift just beneath. Rivers don’t just stand between one side and another. They try to carry off anyone who would cross them, catch them up in their currents and hasten them to the sea. They dare any would-be trespassers: just try to get past me! The Potomac River once divided this country into north and south. The Mississippi marks for us east and west. The Rio Grande tells us in or out. Yes, rivers make great barriers.

Take Me to the Water

            The sea is a dangerous foe in the eyes of Scripture. It is the swirling, chaotic waters of the sea that God brings under control at the beginning of creation in Genesis 1. The sea brings forth life according to God’s command, but that life includes the fearful beast Leviathan in Job and the whale that swallows Jonah and holds him in its belly for three days. To cross the sea is to make an uncertain voyage to a distant land, to be cut off from the good and certain shores of Israel. Yet for whatever reason, the path of the Hebrew people fleeing from Egypt leads them right up to the edge of the sea. It didn’t have to be this way. The exodus takes place three thousand years before the Suez Canal was built. There were land routes that would have completely avoided the sea. Nonetheless, for whatever reason, the Hebrew people find themselves at a dead end: the sea on one side, and the Egyptian army closing in on the other.

The Voice of Love

The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag. Look, there he stands behind our wall, gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice.

            For every one of us gathered here this morning, love has a voice. The voice of love is more than a sound. It is not just something we hear and recognize. Love’s voice speaks to our hearts as much as to our ears. The voice of love is the voice of intimacy and of gentleness, the voice of caresses and of tears, the voice of caring and of concern. It is the voice we know more than any other in the whole world. For Isaac, in our reading from Genesis this morning, the voice of love was Rebekah’s voice, the voice of the woman Isaac loved more than any other, the woman who comforted him after his mother’s death. For some of us here this morning, love’s voice is the voice of the one seated next to us right now, or maybe the voice of one just across the room. For others of us, love’s voice has gone quiet; it is a voice not heard for far too long. Still, all of us, I think, know love’s voice. We know the voice of the one we love, of the friend, or the parent, or the spouse—of the one we call beloved. For every one of us gathered here this morning, love has a voice.